Facebook Solutions Engineer Interview Questions
Updated Oct 29, 2020
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I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Facebook (United States)
- Phone screen with recruiter to discuss the role and your background - Technical phone screen with engineer to solve problems on coderpad - Virtual onsite (2 coder pad interviews, 1 system design interview, 1 cross functional interview with product person, 1 behavioral interview with engineering manager) Facebook does an excellent job of recruiting, the recruiters are top notch and guide you throughout the whole process. I felt prepared each step of the way.
- Leetcode medium and hard questions

I applied online. I interviewed at Facebook (Argentina)
Clear, process well defined. First RH call you then go to glider portal. Access and resolve problems like hacker rank medium-hard related to String, Array, Graphs. Clear, process well defined. First RH call you then go to glider portal. Access and resolve problems like hacker rank medium-hard related to String, Array, Graphs.
- Glider 2 problems

I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Facebook (London, England) in Dec 2019
The first stage is an on call interview via the internal messaging platform, it'll be a video call of about 30 minutes, there is then a coding interview (also video call) and finally an in person "jedi" interview, in which you're asked to complete tasks in front of actual Facebook engineers.
- Tell us about yourself and your work?

I applied through an employee referral The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Facebook (United States) in Jul 2019
I submitted an online application and got referred by an employee. A recruiter reached out to me via email, and we scheduled a phone screen within a week. The recruiter called about 10 minutes late, then proceeded to give an overview of the position before asking a few very basic questions about my experience. One of his questions was "how many lines of code have you written?" which is an absurd thing to ask of someone who has been in the industry almost 15 years. Is there a right answer to that question? If so, how do you evaluate the technical ability of somebody who has been counting lines of code for 15 years? In any case, he said there were no openings in the city in which I applied for the position (despite the listing on their website), and offered to keep my resume on file. Not holding my breath for a call because overall, his comments and handling of the interview indicated that he had already made up his mind that I was not the right candidate, and the whole process was just a formality. What a waste of my time.
- General questions about your experience

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Facebook (United States) in Jun 2019
Recruiter reached out for a software engineering role. Those roles don't exist in Chicago so I inquired about the Solutions engineering role. Spoke to a recruiter, learned about the role and spent about a month studying for the phone screen. Did about 50 Leetcode problems in preparation. Got a question I had practiced but when I offered my solution the interviewer said "that wasn't optimal" and never recovered. Also, she showed me some sample outputs that didn't make any sense to me.
- Remove the invalid parentheses from a string.

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Facebook (Menlo Park, CA) in May 2019
Contacted by a recruiter and had a 15 minute rushed conversation with the recruiter. He was a little slow - he asked me my location 3 times and kept asking me the same thing twice. He was clearly in a rush and didn't let me ask him any questions before ending the phone call. I emailed him with some questions later on in the day and he didn't respond to those. He only responded to matters relating to scheduling the phone interview. All of his replies were of course templated auto-responses. Very unprofessional. He then sent me an online quiz: Given an array of n integers where n > 1, nums, return an array output such that output[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of nums except nums[i]. After I submitted that, a couple of days later, he asked to set up a phone interview with a Solutions Engineer. Phone screen: The interviewer called 5 minutes late. He was very inexperienced at interviewing. 8 months on the job. Questions: - Why do you want to be a solutions engineer - What was the biggest challenge - He then asked me a LC hard question (on coderpad): Remove Invalid Parentheses - Remove the minimum number of invalid parentheses in order to make the input string valid. He has clearly pasted this question from LC or somewhere and he didn't have a clue about what the question was. He wasn't able to answer any of my questions regarding the question it self - I asked him what a valid parentheses was in this scenario and there was a long pause from his side. He was not experienced in interviewing and that combined with his lack of technical skills and sparse knowledge of the question made the interview very difficult. He was looking for an 'optimized stack solution' . I wasn't able to come up with it. I did however give him an optimized backtracking and another BFS solution (both of which are optimal solutions) and he wasn't happy with that. He eventually got audibly frustrated and asked to "code it up" and when I asked which solution, he said "anything". I coded up the solution (which I compiled later on an IDE and it worked beautifully). I am not sure what this optimized stack solution is but clearly not solving the problem EXACTLY the way he wanted it was grounds to reject me. Really closed minded of Facebook. Apparently they let anyone to conduct an interview.
- Given an array of n integers where n > 1, nums, return an array output such that output[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of nums except nums[i].
- Remove Invalid Parentheses - Remove the minimum number of invalid parentheses in order to make the input string valid.

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Facebook (London, England) in May 2019
A recruiter reached out. The whole process took from four to 5 weeks (around one month). I interviewed for a Solutions Engineer position at Facebook London UK in May 2019.
- Get the index of the largest item in the list. And if the list has this item more than once, each time return a different one.
- Modify a give binary tree into a doubly linked list

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Facebook (London, England) in Mar 2019
So the process started very nice! A recruiter reached to me about solution engineering positions, I found them very interesting so I decided to give it a go. We had an initial phone screening and he decided to continue with a technical phone screen which I passed and was then scheduled for a full interview cycle. The full interview was actually very good. I consider it to be one of the best interviews I ever performed at, which was backed up by the interviewers telling me more than once feedback comments like "Great, this is exactly what I was looking for" and things like "This is really good" So I finished knowing for a fact that I got the job. The interview was on Friday, the recruiter told me that I will get the answer the next week, probably in the middle of the week but at most near the end of it. On Saturday, I sent an email to the recruiter thanking him for the opportunity and waited for the feedback. On Thursday, I thought maybe I should ping him to get an auto respond back that he left to take a vacation and will return after a week! Yes! He seriously did that without bothering telling me any damn thing! So I sent an email to the interview coordinator asking her about feedback, she got me one of his colleagues to tell me that the team decided not to pursue further and I should get in contact with the recruiter to know why! Just like that! So I sent another email to the recruiter asking why this happened since I have been doing that for over 17 years and it's almost impossible for me to walk out of an interview that I feel was 100% and get a response like that and until today, ZERO responses back! I consider this to be super disrespectful from their side and it placed a huge red flag on Facebook for me! If they can't even respect me enough to reply back to my emails once they decided not to continue, then this is a place I never want to work in ever!
- First question was about some string operations related to anagrams
- Was a question about tree operations related to finding minimal common subtree for specific nodes
- Was a general management related questions
- A case study
- A general sales interview on how to prioritize tasks and talk to non-tech people

I applied online. The process took 12 months. I interviewed at Facebook (United States) in Jan 2019
I got an email from a recruiter at Facebook in January 2019, asking if I wanted to discuss an opportunity. The following week we had a recruiter screen. He told me that he had my resume from 2016 (three years prior!), when I applied to this job. It had been so long I hadn't even remembered applying! He asks when I would like to start the interview process, and I tell him that I'm comfortable starting at any time. The next Friday I received an email about the first round - an online coding challenge. The recruiter's email both said that I would be given 45 minutes to complete it AND later that I would be given 25 minutes to complete it, and to call him with any questions over the weekend I had to complete it. I both emailed and called to get this big time discrepancy clarified, and he did not respond until almost midnight Sunday night (it was due Monday afternoon). When he did respond (45 minutes), he extended the due date by 12 hours. His email also had a FAQ section about the question, which was very misleading. Without breaching the NDA I signed, I'll give you an analogy. The FAQ was all about baseball - there are 3 strikes before you're out, 4 balls to be walked, etc - so I expected and prepared for a "baseball" question. But then the question I got was about "football". Sure, I should know about it all, but it was so misleading that I thought I was given the wrong question! I honestly think he copy/pasted information about another question (that was for 25 minutes and about "baseball") into my email, causing all of these problems. Regardless of what the email says, prepare for any type of question in this round.
- Why did you apply to this job in 2016?

I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Facebook (São Paulo, São Paulo)
A primeira etapa do processo seletivo foi uma entrevista técnica via Skype com duração de 45 minutos. Infelizmente, meu entrevistador parecia muito despreparado. Perdeu muito tempo me fazendo perguntas comportamentais (que não deveria ser o foco da entrevista), de modo que sobraram apenas uns 20 minutos para o restante da entrevista, que compreendeu a de resolução de um problema algorítmico e uma parte onde eu poderia fazer perguntas a empresa. O tempo tão curto não permitiu que eu fizesse uma solução nem próxima de completa, de modo que ele não teve como avaliar satisfatoriamente a minha habilidade em programação. Só fui receber o feedback 1 mês depois. Não passei para a etapa seguinte do processo.
- Dada uma árvore binária, determinar o valor do caminho mais longo.